Corpus of a Siam Mosquito

by Steven David Justin Sills

Jatupon was floundering too from more than the nausea of lost blood. He was half a boy and half a man and this newly begotten half called a “man” was having manhood castigated, excoriated, and leaked from him. Callow as he was, he was not just half a man or half a boy the way the Nightjar poem concerned itself with a bird-boy. He was a hybrid of boy/man and God with vast wisdom from fathoms of himself examined from suffering.

He again stared at the other presence in the room. It was a monster, a being of violence, and an unknown phantom. Still this monster was the one who had delivered him from the watery abyss, the one who did not chastise his addiction (at least then he didn’t) but was with him through the withdraws, the one who fixed his bicycle, who had introduced him to basketball and his first beer. Appearing like his brother it was the brother mixed with some type of shadowy creature he could not comprehend and this being, familiar and unfamiliar, he loathed. The elastic of his underwear had been encroached. He had been violated with those fingers. His body had been flipped over like a pancake. He had felt his face pushed in a puddle of his blood. Sitting on the floor, piercing him with his eyes, he wanted to purge this beast from his life. Then a few seconds later his next conscious assembly of understanding only made him want to vanish. He wanted so much of the impossible that second: for the substance of his own life to vaporize swiftly and meaninglessly and opposite of this, to kill the monster and resurrect his dwarfed manhood in his own eyes. Sitting there he felt as if time had ended and that all entities on the Earth were waiting and watching the two of them in silent dread but neither god nor man cared about any aspect of this relationship at all. Things went on as cruel as death. In one second a fly flew and landed in a bottle of water, a dog barked from outside, a rat scurried around in front of the building for food, a family was feuding in the apartment above him, and a car came onto the thin long back-road called a soi.

Kazem looked onto this bludgeoned ugly little face reluctantly and Jatupon felt like a piggish or bovine woman whose acquaintance said, “We could never be more than friends, you know” and she—Yes, she could see. She could see—hadn’t she seen it before? Had she really dismissed those countless earlier smirks of repugnance aimed at her fat enervated face and her clumsy tense body both of which made her nothing. Mother nature made the being breed with the best of bodies to create a good physical specimen in the baby. Sex, romance, or just an intimate talk with a man would not be hers since she could not trigger the pleasure response—not even intellectually. Romantic and sexual inclinations were discriminatory. They were as cruel as death and she would tell him that sex wasn’t intimacy although she wouldn’t believe it. She craved such intimacy more than she could ever articulate and she would not tell him that. She would tell him that being in love was a delusion that one biologically craved to propagate the species. She would say that she did not want to go through the brief illusion of being in love. She did not want to be high in urinary molecules from his underwear flying into her face when he had her denuded and lying on a bed littered in clothes. She would tell him that one generation after another would dance its sexual dance before passing and that she had been fortunate enough to be born a disagreeably unaesthetic thing with a face like a mushy old apple.

Feeling sick and weak, his mind was running away from him. His head was thinking himself a different gender. He was believing that he could hear the content of the feuding family upstairs. The eldest son, having gotten his girlfriend pregnant, had been compelled to bring her into the home and the fight was about him running away from the family every evening after work to drink with his buddies.

Then suddenly, without even knowing it, he stood up, grabbed the television that Kazem had given to him as a gift, and he was running toward him. There he was aiming the television at his brother’s head only to have it reflexively snatched from him by Kazem’s dexterous fingertips. Finally, there he was peering up at it and backing away into the corner where he came from, realizing that one impulse materialized in action had caused a counter action that was about ready to kill him. It had been just one unrestrained impulse that, repulsive to the consciousness, he hadn’t even considered; and it had slipped from his brain slimy as a worm. It had materialized in action and now it had lethal consequences.

“Don’t play so hard, boys” said Kumpee. In Jatupon’s perspective the stink of his smoke-ridden clothes and the beer of his breath gave an acrid and fetid cloud which was miraculously saving him.

Kazem lowered his arms. “Where the hell have you been?” he asked. He put the television on the floor relieved at having escaped the worst passion that can fulminate in a man and lose him in the deepest abyss of regret. Sweat poured from Kazem’s forehead and his face became a deep red in chagrin.

“With my woman. If you were to have a woman you wouldn’t have so much time to play with your Jatu-PORN.”

“Where’s our money?”

“Invested.”